Performing New Orleans: Toward a Political Poetics

摘要

This essay documents an embodied model for doing scholarship in and about post-Katrina New Orleans. It suggests lived experience as human capital that provides a public good for rebuilding communities. Specifically, a research-based performance (“Performance and New Orleans: Citizenship, Identity and Housing”) serves as a case study for situating scholarship between theory and practice as a “political poetics.” The essay draws on performance theory and the values of public scholarship to negotiate the challenges of authenticity and motive that confront scholars working in New Orleans. The essay also argues for performance as a means of reaffirming human value and exposing the complexity that surrounds the problems of African American citizenship, identity, and housing in New Orleans 5 years after the storm.